I recently read an essay on biology and art that presents the best case I've ever seen of integrating the two. Most examples of biology and art influencing each other describe what amounts to little more than a one-way street, with artists being inspired by living organisms, by biological research, or by the results of such research. It’s more difficult to find examples of scientists being assisted by artists beyond producing illustrations. The case I want to describe involves an artist who is also a biologist, and who has found his art to be essential to his research. He is Jonathan Kingdon, an authority on African mammals in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford in England. Raised in Africa, he remembers picnicking at Olduvai Gorge and spending vacations on the Serengeti plains. He trained as an artist at Oxford and then began teaching at the University of East Africa. There, Kingdon conceived the idea of studying the evolution of African mammals. Not surprisingly, he began by drawing them and, thus, by comparing the morphology of related species. He soon went on to investigate behavior, ecology, anatomy, and biogeography, but his work was always rooted in his art.

Kingdon describes in detail, and with the aid of many illustrations, how he used drawing as a way to observe these mammals closely and to correlate behavior with anatomy. He argues that photography couldn’t do the job: it didn’t force him to observe but did the work of looking for him, and in an inferior way. In addition, he makes a more novel argument: that a camera doesn’t see in the way a human does and so doesn’t create the kind of image that is most familiar to the human mind. A camera processes all points of light in the …